The international aspect of the National Theatre's youth festival is
now so firmly established that it doesn't need to be flagged in the title
any more; under new sponsorship, it's simply Shell Connections.
This year sees fourteen performances of ten specially commissioned plays,
including companies from Ireland and Australia and scripts from Finland
and Norway.

One oddity persists, though. The season has always been a celebration
of the professionalism and high standards of achievement that young people's
companies attain, and yet comperes for the double-bills presented each
evening continue to resort, as comedian Gina Yashere did on Wednesday,
to panto-style warm-up routines that have the opposite effect, of infantilising
the audience.

I must admit to finding it agreeably ironic that Yashere's routine of
souping us all up to frenzied applause was followed by the most inappropriate
play possible, Purple by Jon Fosse. The Norwegian playwright may
have heard of humour, but he clearly doesn't think it will ever catch on.
As a no-hope rock band rehearses in the dank cellar of a disused factory
and a love triangle is never quite articulated, the occasional chuckles
largely come from our embarrassed recognition of teen awkwardness. Fosse,
in David Harrower's translation, captures the broody, repetitious nothingness
aspect of adolescence well, as does the Lyceum Youth Theatre of Edinburgh:
Ben Clifford's curtains of hair hanging over his face add to the detachment
as he plucks away at an irritating two-chord sequence on his guitar. Unfortunately,
like the music they're playing, the young Scots' performances never quite
blare convincingly or aggressively enough on the few, brief occasions when
blaring is required.

Fosse's four-boys-one-girl configuration suggests a possible lack of
thought about the demands of youth theatre pieces. In contrast, Maya Chowdhry's
The
Crossing Path bursts all over the Cottesloe stage with a cast of 22
– the number of cards in the Major Arcana of a Tarot pack. Everybody gets
to dress up and throw shapes as young Rhiannon and her associates get lost
in a night forest where worlds overlap, but the content is a mish-mash
of mysticism, ritual, ecological tub-thumping and miscellaneous "yoof"
stuff. In theory, there's all sorts to get your teeth into; in practice,
as the Samuel Whitbread Community College from Cambridge found despite
their laudable efforts, there's too little to get a firm grip on.